As someone who communicates on a daily basis with those in spirit, I was very excited to be sitting down recently with my family to watch a new DVD release, ParaNorman which was in the theaters this past summer.

ParaNorman is about a kid with the ability to see ghosts and spirits, not only can he see them, he can also communicate with them.

He is the only one in his family with these abilities and at school he is teased and given a hard time for his unique abilities.

The movie centers on a curse that a “witch” had placed upon the town many years ago during a very dark chapter in the towns history, similar to the Salem witch trials.

A group of spirits/ghosts are awoken and pretty soon things in town get really weird and Norman is the towns only hope for dealing with the angry ghosts.

The movie gets a little wild and crazy here and plays very loosely with reality as the ghosts become zombies and go on the attack.

Filmed in stop motion animation by the same folks who do Flushed Away and Coraline, the movie is very well done.

A good way to describe the movie is take one part the Sixth Sense, one part Scooby Doo and one part Diary of a Wimpy Kid and roll them all together into one movie – it works.

Both adults and kids will find this movie entertaining, and the ending is fantastic! I found myself teared up and I was not the only one.

I highly recommend this movie and give it 4.75 stars out of 5 – the only thing that kept it from being a solid five star review was the inclusion of zombies in what was otherwise a fairly realistic take on the paranormal.

Go out and buy it and add it to your movie collection today, you will not be disappointed.

When I first became aware that we had a ghost in our home back in January of 2006, one of the first things I did was research them. While browsing the internet I found many web sites with photos of orbs that were labeled as ghosts and or spirits. I then asked my wife Heidi to grab a camera and asked her to photograph the area of the room that I was pointing to as I “saw” our ghost at that location. When we looked at the photo I was happy and shocked to see a very clear orb right where I had pointed at. For the next several months I would take pictures of our ghost and her orb kept popping in the photos.

At one point we had the ghosts of two children in our home and we photographed the two orbs together. After continuing to research orbs I found that there was a backlash going around the net and that many of the “experts” in the field of paranormal research were discrediting orbs as proof of a spirit or ghost being caught on film. They talked about lens flare … dust particles and insects and how even raindrops or dirt particles would reflect the flash back to the camera and create a orb like effect due to the shape of the lens. So I decided to test the theory that you could “make” orbs appear in your photos. I took a handful of dust and threw it off the balcony at nighttime while taking pictures with a digital camera with the flash on. In my before photo I captured about 5 random small orbs, after tossing the dirt/dust and photographing the same area I caught hundreds if not thousands of orbs in my photo. That was the end of my orb fascination.

But … what about the ones that I captured where I was pointing right at them? And, what about the photo of two orbs side by side that I had as well as the ones of the ghosts at the clocktower and the ghost in our backyard. The more I thought about it the more I had to look into it. When I see orbs with the “naked” eye, they are real enough … my wife and sister have seen them as well. Then it dawned on me … some of the orbs that are photographed are dust etc., while occasionally the orbs captured on film are genuine ghosts and spirits.

It’s all about physics. Think about this, what is the natural form that is taken on by falling water … an orb, what is the natural shape taken by a bubble … an orb. A ball of energy will take on a form that is most natural and efficient within the physical world and for a “shapeless” mass that would be a sphere, just like the planets in the solar system and the stars in the universe.

So … while orb pictures can be genuine, I believe that the vast majority of them are nothing to get excited about. I believe that orbs can be used as additional “evidence” of a presence, but not as proof of the presence of a spirit or ghost. I no longer look for orbs and frankly have no interest in viewing peoples photos with orbs in them and then trying to figure out who is in the photo.

For more information about myself and what I do as a psychic medium and animal (pet) communicator, visit my website at www.charlespeden.com.